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DUBLIN, N.H. – You’d expect an almanac to predict the weather, and it does, but this year’s Old Farmer’s Almanac also offers predictions on what we’ll wear, eat and do for fun in the coming year.
The latest edition was released Tuesday, and if the almanac’s traditional “80 percent” accurate weather forecasts are on the mark, believers in wide areas of the country will be wearing their woolies to protect against a winter of above normal snowfall, below normal temperatures, or both.
“Cold and snowy for a lot of the country,” is how Editor-in-Chief Jud Hale sums things up.
“We think it’s gonna be quite a bit colder than average from the Rocky Mountains eastward,” he said, except for Montana, Wyoming, northern New England and the Appalachians, “but even those areas would be very cold toward the end of winter.”
Believers will be looking for more snow than usual from the Great Lakes, across New England and down to the Middle Atlantic states, and from northeastern New Mexico, across northern Texas and Oklahoma, across the Ohio Valley to the Middle Atlantic.
The Old Farmer’s Almanac – not to be confused with the 188-year-old Farmers’ Almanac in Lewiston, Maine – has been published since 1792, making it North America’s oldest continuously published periodical.
Its ads are for just about everyone, with products to clean up yards, homes and hair as well as skin, toes and fingers and to treat “irritable bowels.”
As usual, this edition offers “new, useful and entertaining matter” on everything from history to cultivating vegetables and curing ailments, meeting people and making yourself a genius.
“You should not go to a singles resort,” to meet people, Hale notes, with tongue in cheek. “When you arrive, it’s always like you are late for a party.”
He likes the idea of meeting people while standing in line somewhere, like at the movies. It’s clear you have at least one thing in common with those around you, you’re headed in the same direction, and you have time on your hands.
“So you’re all bored and start chatting,” he said, “then you come up with, ‘Hey, come here often?”‘
“A train is good,” he said, leading to this possible conversation starter: “You feeling ill, my dear?”
“We should have put in some opening lines,” Hale said. “Maybe next year.”
Hale likes this year’s article on how close you can get to a hog barn before you can smell it. It depends on things like the wind, the cleanliness of the barns and the sensitivity of the researchers.
“Volunteers must undergo a chemical calibration process,” according to the article. “Only worthy noses are elevated to the coveted level of pig manure sniffer.”
Each year, the almanac staff considers up to 600 ideas for anniversary stories. One that made the cut this year is a heartbreaking story of Floyd Collins, a Kentucky farmer who was pinned in a cave 80 years ago.
Complete with a newspaper reporter’s account of crawling deep into the cave to interview Collins, the story recounts a drama that captivated the country for several weeks in 1925, and was so memorable that in 1975, Kentucky residents voted it the top statewide news story of the century.
The little yellow magazine with the hole in the upper left-hand corner (so it can hang in outhouses) still contains astronomic information and tide charts that were so accurate the government considered banning them during World War II, fearing they would help German spies.
“Real almanac enthusiasts are tuned in to that information,” Hale said. “It provides a certain structure and order to the universe.”
And it tries to sort out some disorder, advising that appliances are available that reset their own digital clocks when the power blinks and suggesting carmakers embed a global positioning device in car keys so we’ll never lose them again.
“Some gizmo will help you find the key, but what if you lose the gizmo,” Hale wondered.
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